A Cigar

In my youth, I was spoiled for a long time. No one really spoiled me. I took care to spoil myself, again and again. But the bitch Reality often intruded.

I was spending a dream summer on a small Mexican island on the Caribbean. Everyone should have at least one dream summer, I think, and no one should wait for old age. I had several dream summers myself. Anyway, my then-future-ex-wife, or TFEW (pronounced as spelled) and I were renting one of four joined concrete cubes right on the beach, on the seaward side of the island.

There was no running water in the cell but you could clear the indoor toilet with a bucket of seawater. You could also buy a bucket of nearly fresh water for a shower. There was a veranda and the doors locked. We slept in our own hammocks outside in the sea breeze most nights, although there was a cot inside. We also cooked on our butane stove on the veranda. We thought it was all cool. There was a million-dollar ocean view (probably an underestimate).

To feed ourselves, we bought pounds of local oranges and bread baked daily. Mostly, I dived for fish and spiny lobster all day. It got to the point where we grew tired of lobster. I even went to the water's edge slaughterhouse early one morning to compete for some shreds of bleeding turtle meat. Turtle meat, it turns out, looks like beef, but it tastes like old fish. Then I invented new ways of cooking lobster. The TFEW was a good soldier who liked reading. Also, her patience was frequently rewarded (but I am too much the gentleman to expand on this).

One morning, I woke up by myself near dawn and prepared my Nescafé, bent down on the small butane stove set on the tiled floor of the veranda. I looked up to the sea for a second and I was hit by a scene from the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel. Less than one hundred yards from me, bobbing up and down but stationary, was a low wooden boat packed with about 50 or 60 people just standing silently. They were not talking, they were not shouting, and they were not moving. It was like a dream, of course, but I knew I was not dreaming. Quickly, details came into focus. One detail was that one of the people in the boat wore a khaki uniform and the characteristic hat of the Cuban militia. Goddamn, I thought, this is what I have been reading and seeing on television for years! It's the real thing!

Then the practical part of my brain took over. I tried to yell at them that my rocky beach was not a good place to land. One made a gesture indicating they could not hear me because of the small breakers. Bravely, I abandoned my undrunk Nescafé and dived into the waters I knew well, because I had taken a dozen lobsters right there, under the same rocks, in front of my door. I did the short swim in a minute or two, and hanging from the side of the boat I told them how to go around a nearby point past which there was a real harbor. They thanked me in a low voice, like very tired people, in a language that was clearly Spanish but that sounded almost comical to my ears.

An hour later, I walked to the harbor where the main café also was to find out about my refugees. Naturally, I felt a little possessive of them since I had discovered them all by myself. Soon after I arrived, they started coming out of processing by the local Mexican authorities. (Incidentally, I think I witnessed there a model of humane efficiency worth mentioning.) Each walked toward the café, an envelope of Mexican pesos in hand.

A tall, skinny black Cuban spotted me, from earlier in the morning, when I was in the water. He walked briskly to me and took me in his arms. It was moving but pretty natural, since I was the first free human being he had laid eyes on in his peril-fraught path to freedom. He spoke very quickly with an accent I was not used to. What perplexed me is that he kept saying “negro,” with great emotion. After a few seconds in his embrace, I realized he was calling me, “mi negro.” I wondered for an instant how I had become a Negro's Negro. Then it came back to me, out of some long buried reading, that Cuban men sometimes call their mistress “mi negra,” irrespective of color, the overt color reference serving as a term of endearment, of tenderness.

I took my new buddy to the café to buy him breakfast. He pulled out my chair ceremoniously and took an oblong metallic object out of the breast pocket of his thin synthetic shirt. This he handed to me with tears in his eyes. Inside was a long Cuban cigar. I did not have the heart to tell him I did not like cigars. I smoked the damn thing until my stomach floated in my throat. He watched beatifically, in the lucid understanding that that little act testified to his personal victory against the barbarism of communism.